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I bought a GPU off some guy on Kijiji in 2021. He wanted $1,800 for a card that retailed for $700. I sent the e-transfer before he could change his mind.
He thought he was ripping me off. Probably told his friends about the idiot who paid double for a graphics card.
That card made me $11,000.
Here's what I've been thinking about lately. There's a car in Vegas right now, an Ioniq, driving itself around picking up passengers. No safety driver. No remote operator babysitting it. Just a car, doing car things, except the car things now include generating revenue.
And like fifteen miles away there's a dealership with the same car sitting on the lot. Same platform. Same bones. Slightly different sensor package. The dealer has it marked up $2k for the premium trim and he's annoyed it's been sitting for 18 days.
He doesn't know yet.
The thing about disruption is it doesn't announce itself. It doesn't send a calendar invite. One day you're running your business the way you've always run it and then you look up and the game changed while you were optimizing the old game.
I think about Blockbuster a lot. Not because it's a good analogy - it's overused - but because of the specific moment. There's a point where Blockbuster could've bought Netflix for $50 million. They laughed. Why would we buy a DVD mail service? We have stores. We have customers. We have the relationship.
They were right about everything except the thing that mattered.
So this is what I think is actually happening:
For a hundred years a car has been a hole you pour money into. You buy it, it starts dying. Insurance, gas, maintenance, depreciation - every month it costs you and every month it's worth less. The entire financial system around cars evolved to manage this decay. Dealers move inventory fast because a car on the lot is bleeding value. Lenders structure loans around depreciation curves. Insurers price risk based on the inevitability of human error.
The car was never an asset. It was an expense you could sit in.
And now, for the first time, the car can work.
Not theoretically. Not in some pilot program. Right now. Vegas, Austin, San Francisco, Phoenix. Cars are driving themselves, picking up passengers, collecting money. The technology is not coming. It's running.
I keep doing the math in my head and it keeps breaking my assumptions.
Say a Model 3 costs $40k. Say it drives for Uber or whatever robotaxi network exists, six hours a day while you're at work, earns $20/hour after platform fees. That's $120 a day. $3,600 a month. $43,000 a year.
The car pays for itself in eleven months. Then it just... keeps going.
But here's where my brain starts glitching. How do you value that? It's not a $40k car anymore. It's a $40k car that throws off $40k a year. What's the multiple on that? If you valued it like a rental property at a 5 cap, that car is worth $800,000.
Nobody's paying $800k for a Model 3. Obviously. But the point is the valuation framework doesn't work anymore. We're pricing these things like depreciating appliances when they're becoming income-generating assets. The mental model is broken and most people haven't noticed.
I think about that Kijiji GPU a lot.
The guy who sold it to me understood graphics cards. He'd probably built PCs his whole life. Knew the specs, the benchmarks, the generational improvements. He priced it based on what he knew: this is a high-end gaming card, supply is constrained, I can get double retail from some sucker who really wants to play Cyberpunk.
What he didn't understand was that the card had become something else. It wasn't a gaming card anymore. It was a money printer. The same hardware, but running different software, doing different things. He sold me a money printer for the price of a gaming card because he was pricing the object, not the capability.
The dealership sitting on that Level 4 Ioniq is the same guy. They're pricing the car. Sticker plus markup plus dealer fees plus the usual bullshit. They don't understand they're sitting on a fleet of revenue-generating assets disguised as inventory.
Some will figure it out. Most won't.
Here's the part that gets me:
You can trade futures on frozen orange juice. Pork bellies. Wheat. Fucking lumber. There are sophisticated financial markets for concentrated citrus products.
There's no futures market for used cars.
How is this possible? Cars have VINs. Standardized specs. Regulated manufacturing. There are only so many configurations of a 2024 Camry - it's more standardized than a house. And unlike orange juice, unlike lumber, unlike literally any other commodity, a car is designed to move itself.
So why can't you trade them like real assets?
Because they couldn't move without a human. A car in Phoenix was stuck in Phoenix unless someone drove it to LA. The friction was so high that real price discovery couldn't happen. The market stayed local, fragmented, opaque. Dealers loved this - inefficiency is where margin lives.
Self-driving ends this. The car can reposition itself. If Camrys are trading higher in Texas than California, the car drives to Texas. Arbitrage becomes possible. The market becomes liquid.
And when a market becomes liquid, it becomes financialized. Derivatives. Futures. Securitization. Someone is going to package robotaxi revenue streams like mortgage-backed securities. Some pension fund is going to own a tranche of autonomous vehicle cash flows.
This sounds insane. It's going to happen within five years.
The dealers are going to be fascinating to watch.
These are not dumb people. Dealers have survived everything - recessions, credit crunches, the internet, Tesla's direct sales model. They've optimized every angle of extraction from a car transaction. Documentation fees, market adjustments, trade-in arbitrage, F&I products. They are apex predators of the car-buying experience.
COVID proved it. Chip shortage hit, inventory dried up, and dealers didn't hesitate for a second. $10k market adjustments. $20k. $30k on a Bronco. They saw scarcity, they saw demand, they captured the spread. No hand-wringing. No concern about customer relationships. Just pure margin extraction.
When Level 4 vehicles start hitting dealer lots with 200 deposits on 15 units and aftermarket prices 50% over sticker, they're going to adapt. Fast. Some will flip them, take the quick profit. The smarter ones will pause.
Wait. Why am I selling this?
If this car generates $4,000 a month, and I have fifteen of them, that's $60k monthly. $720k a year. From cars I was going to sell for $8k gross each.
The dealership becomes a fleet operator. The lot isn't inventory - it's a stable of revenue-generating assets. The pressure inverts. Every day a car sits without earning is a day of lost revenue. The business model that rewarded fast turns now rewards holding.
Most dealers will let this drive right past them. The ones who don't will become something entirely new.
Insurance is fucked. Like, completely fucked.
Auto insurance is a business built on human chaos. Every pricing model, every risk table, every actuarial assumption is calibrated around the fundamental truth that humans are unpredictable and they crash cars.
Young men pay more because young men are idiots. Urban zip codes pay more because city driving is combat. DUI history spikes your premium because past behavior predicts future carnage.
Self-driving cars are software. They don't get tired. They don't get angry. They don't check their phone at 80mph. They do exactly what the algorithm says, every time, the same way, forever.
So what's the risk model? It's not "will this driver fuck up" anymore. It's "does version 2.4.1 have an edge case bug in unprotected left turns?"
Insurance becomes a software quality problem. And here's the thing - Tesla knows more about their software's risk profile than any insurance company ever will. They have data on billions of miles. They know exactly which scenarios cause interventions. They know when a new update makes things better or worse.
Why would Tesla let State Farm insure their fleet when Tesla can self-insure with better information? They'll cut the insurance industry out entirely. Capture the margin themselves.
Progressive, Geico, Allstate - these companies are the Blockbuster of the 2030s and they don't know it yet.
The lending math breaks too.
Auto loans are structured around depreciation. Bank gives you $40k, knows the car will be worth $25k in three years, structures the loan to stay ahead of the decay. If you default, they repo and recover. The math works because everyone agrees cars lose value.
What happens when they don't?
What happens when the collateral is cash-flowing? When the car generates more than the payment? When the "asset" is actually an asset?
The loan structure has to change. This isn't consumer debt anymore. It's equipment financing. Business lending. The lender should be underwriting the revenue potential, not just the borrower's credit score.
I can see something like: you put down a bond against the vehicle's earning potential. Payments come partially from the car's revenue. The lender has a claim on cash flows, not just the collateral. Early payoff costs more if the vehicle is outperforming.
The consumer-commercial distinction collapses. Your personal car is also your income stream. The financing has to reflect that.
Who builds the Nicehash?
Because that GPU I bought off Kijiji was useless without software. I could've stacked ten cards in my basement and had nothing but expensive space heaters. Nicehash was the thing that made it work - download the app, point your hardware at a mining pool, watch money appear. One-click complexity abstraction.
That's what made mining go mainstream. Not the hardware. The software layer that let normies participate.
Autonomous vehicles need this. Right now if you have a Tesla with FSD, you can't just flip a switch and start earning. The network doesn't exist. The regulatory framework isn't there. Tesla's building it, but it's not shipped.
The second someone builds the dead-simple interface - register your car, set your hours, money appears - this market explodes.
Tesla will build their own. Closed ecosystem, 25% take rate, only works with Teslas. The Apple model.
But what about everyone else? BMW, Hyundai, Ford, Mercedes - they're all working on autonomy. They're all going to want their own networks. And they're all going to build mediocre software because car companies are not software companies no matter how many times their CEOs say "software-defined vehicles" on earnings calls.
Someone will build the aggregator. The platform that works across OEMs. The Android to Tesla's iOS.
Uber's right there. They already have the demand side - riders, routes, pricing. They sold their autonomy unit but they could partner with every OEM who doesn't want to build their own stack. Become the default infrastructure layer.
Or it's someone new. Some startup that sees the gap.
Whoever builds this will be worth more than Ford within a decade.
The car, as a concept, is being reinvented. For a hundred years it was a liability that moved you around. Now it's an asset that works for you.
This breaks everything. Dealers become fleet operators or die. Lenders become equipment financiers or get disintermediated. Insurers become data companies or get cut out by OEMs who own the risk. A platform layer emerges that captures more value than the hardware manufacturers.
The transition will be fast. Faster than anyone inside the existing system expects. Because the technology is already working. It's not a research problem anymore. It's a deployment problem, a regulatory problem, a business model problem. Those problems get solved by money, and there's a lot of money about to chase this.
The person who sold me that GPU on Kijiji in 2021 made a rational decision based on everything he knew. He was pricing a graphics card. He didn't realize he was selling a productive asset at a massive discount because the frame had shifted and he was still using the old frame.
There are a lot of people about to make the same mistake with cars.
The ones who see it early will build generational wealth. The institutions that don't adapt will be disintermediated. The financial infrastructure of the automotive industry - a hundred years of accumulated assumptions about depreciation and human risk and asset decay - is about to be rewritten.
It's already happening. The car in Vegas knows it. The dealership down the street doesn't.
That gap is the opportunity.